I read this morning about a doctor who went mad and shot people in a hospital. As a doctor myself, I know that docs have terrible stresses trying to deal with a corrupt medical-industrial system that impairs our ability to help people regain their health. Then I went to look at the NY times article, here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/nyregion/bronx-hospital-shooting.html. He's richly melanated, that is to say, he has lived a life of fear because of his skin color. I infer from his violence that he may have been guilty of the accusation--sexual misconduct. He was a man, and he was angry enough to shoot others and hopeless enough to set himself on fire and shoot himself. He did not see any way out. He knew he would not receive compassion.

What people forget when they demonize any group of humans is that they are human. Dark skinned people. Doctors. Men. Gun owners. Murderers. Whatever group. All humans share the same basic needs. When those needs are not met, we have the same basic emotions. Driven hard enough, any of us could become dangerous. Hitler had reasons. The Arabs that flew airplanes into buildings had reasons. No one is pure evil, we are simply human and if tortured we can lash out, or become cunning.

My hope that that everyone who reads this will take a deep breath or three and think about the kind of pain that drives a person to such horrors. My hope is that compassion will rise in spite of the poisonous atmosphere of shame and blame that dominates our political world. We all deserve an opportunity to be free from fear, long enough to find our centers and our hearts and reach out into the world from that place. It will take a lot of us finding compassion to heal these wounds.

The other day while challenging us with a case in which the patient needed extensive advanced medical care the prof asked "OK, what next?". I responded with "Does the patient have medical insurance?" And the professor joked that first on the TO DO list is a "wallet biopsy". We laughed. It is necessary to assess people's ability to pay for treatments, but too painful to use such terms with a patient. But at that point I decided that I need to begin collecting medical slang, not jargon but the most offensive and borderline slang that I hear. I have always been interested in language.

So tonight I was working on my homework assignment for clinic synthesis, and trying to find the abbreviations for a few things, when I ran across the wikipedia page listing medical slang. I have pilfered the entire contents of the wiki page, and started adding to it. I think this may be the beginning of something especially perverse. I LOL'd when I saw the definition of the acronym TEETH.

( medical slang list here, not all offensive, moved forward from 2/20/09Collapse )

Do you have any thoughts, opinions, experience?? Please tell me. What did you have done? What helped? What didn't?

We all know that the hospital is the last place you want to go, unless you really desperately need to be there. That's where the gnarly infections live.

Healthgrades compared mortality data from hospitals across the US and rated them all. I'm pleased to say that Memorial in Chattanooga, TN, made the list, as well as the Mayo clinic hospital in Phoenix, AZ. The Great Lakes region has a top 50 hospital in every state. Ohio and Florida had the most top hospitals (per state). Not a single OR, WV or NY (et. al.) hospital made the list.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html

Here find a revision of the visual pain scale often used in hospitals.

According to Atul Gawande there are 90,000 new ICU admissions per day in the US. Here's more of what he says:

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. ICUs put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that after ten days 4 percent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States and are fatal between 5 and 28 percent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, 4 percent of American ICU patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, 6 percent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death 40 to 45 percent of the time. All in all, about half of ICU patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and once that occurs the chances of survival drop sharply.
--Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto p28.

News Alert: Obama orders hospitals to grant same-sex couples visitation rights
07:34 PM EDT Thursday, April 15, 2010

President Obama signed an order Thursday night requiring hospitals to allow gays and lesbians to have non-family visitors and to grant their partners medical power of attorney.

The president ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit discrimination in hospital visitation. The memo is scheduled to be made public Friday morning, according to an administration official and another source familiar with the White House decision.

An official said the new rule will affect any hospital that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com:
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/RRHKUP/DZZWC/4VCV3L/3XH9IF/XVNKS/7V/t

Types of Imaging:
--plain film radiography, aka x-ray
--tomography
--computed axial tomography (CT or CAT)
--magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
--bone scan/nuclear medicine
--discography
--myelography
--positron emission tomography (PET)
( a few notes on each type of imagingCollapse )